


in service of the greater good

by lesbianbirds



Series: character studies [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, F/F, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-21
Updated: 2020-10-21
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:02:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27132218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbianbirds/pseuds/lesbianbirds
Summary: Gertrude Robinson in the time before her death, was the Head Archivist at the Magnus Institute.She only died once, but she never did manage to redeem herself, if such a thing could ever be possible for someone like her.
Relationships: Agnes Montague/Gertrude Robinson
Series: character studies [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1965208
Comments: 3
Kudos: 18





	in service of the greater good

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to my lovely beta chris, who you can find at @drunkonwords on tumblr! 
> 
> anyway gertrude robinson marry me please <3
> 
> warnings: mentions of animal death (cat), smoking, unhealthy relationships, canonical character death

Two women sit in a cafe, burning cups of tea sitting untouched on the table in front of them. It is a meeting that was a long time coming, their fates weaved together with a spider’s gentle touch.

By all accounts it is a nice cafe, and what it lacked in ambience or decoration it made up in it’s coffee and the surprising lack of fluorescent lighting. There were attempts at lightening the place up, but really the paintings were just sad and the plants blatantly fake.

Agnes would look beautiful in any lighting and any setting. Gertrude didn’t know what she should do with that knowledge except press it carefully into her bones, like a flower between the pages of a book.

*

Agnes was born from fire, sitting in her ashes whole and happy as a newborn can be.

Her cries were commandments to the ring of people around her. Her first word, her first step; they are weighed carefully and held up to be divine. She is a messiah, a figure of flames with her long hair and burning eyes. A tragic story, if you look at her too closely - the isolation, the carefully confined anger.

She is every cliche in the book, every fire set in anger and burning desire. Destruction incarnate, the remains of all the buzzing potential of those sacrificed to her. In Gertrude’s opinion there were no other words but flowery ones for her, if she had ever let herself have that indulgence.

When Agnes is young she fights like it will let all the anger out of her, that if she tears and tears it will spill out of her like blood had spilled out of the girl with the shy smile and pigtails. If she killed a playmate in anger it was a divine act.

The child was probably unholy, anyway, if you asked those who raised her.

Gertrude had seen none of that when she had met her. Only controlled anger, rising to the surface at the slightest touch, the sensation of movement barely stilled.

She craves Agnes’ touch sometimes in those cold late nights at the Institute, as if it could burn out every festering mistake and hollow loss.

(A list of things Gertrude wishes she knew about Agnes, written down so she can stop _thinking_ about it;

1\. The way her skin feels. (If her hands would get sweaty if she was to hold them, if Getrude could memorise the bumps on her skin and the cracks of her lips. If Getrude would ever get the kind of intimacy she craved, a kiss before they slept in their shared bed, before they said goodbye, when they watched a movie.)  
2\. What her favourite movies were. (If she liked romcoms so sweet they made your heart burst or action movies where things went boom in the most satisfying way. (Gertrude doesn’t like explosives so much, now that she has crates of them under her feet.) If she liked the kind of artsy movies Gertrude loved to pick apart or the horror movies that were almost comforting nowadays.)  
3\. What she thinks about when she looks at fire, at spiderwebs and the eyes that are everywhere Getrude goes. (Gertrude wants to look at everything she is, all the childhood dreams (did she want to be a ballerina? Or maybe a scientist, a writer, an exterminator).  
4\. How she took her tea. (Gertrude knows that she takes her coffee “black with room for milk”, but she learns it secondhand and far too late. She doesn’t know if she liked cinnamon or honey in her tea though, or if she prefers it herbal. If she prefers hot chocolate with plenty of marshmallows. Maybe she sticks to coffee.)  
5\. If she loves Gertrude, if she loves burning things. (Gertrude saw a light in her eyes when they’d stood in front of that house, as she stretched out a hand to let the inferno spill out like she’d been waiting for it every day of her life. The flames hadn’t burned her.)

*

When Gertude first gets her job she stares up into a smile that does not belong to the face that wears it. There is an itch to destroy it under her skin, a voice in her ear telling her to burn out the infection that she is only now realises lingers in every high place and shadowy corner of the world.

The most obvious way to do this was to set fire to it and let the destruction cleanse all she hates and all she knows, which some days seem to be the same thing. To look upon what hides in plain sight and let is turn to ashes, to burn up the endlessly turning wheel.

(She read a book about wheels once, curled up under the covers when she was just a little girl with glasses that made her brown eyes look wide and frightened.)

*

Gertrude had always wondered what Agnes’ burning kisses felt like. She doesn’t get that, but she does get a hug.

Sometimes she lifts her shirt up and traces the scars on her skin, twisting to reach where her hands had rested on her back. Love isn’t meant to hurt, Gertrude knows that, but there is something comforting about the scars (Getrude will take what love she can get nowadays).

Somewhere deep inside her she holds the memories of every life she had destroyed, every bright scrap of potential dimmed under her unending watch.

(Sarah Carpenter had stars in her eyes and a touch like she was about to pull you down somewhere deep below the surface, to places people should never go. Getrude hadn’t noticed.)

*

Gertrude sits on the carpeted floor, methodically cutting the eyes out of everything she owns. Her hair is out of her normal bun, the red the glints among it plain to see. ( _You acted as if she was special for all the wrong reasons_ , a voice whispers to her, _a demon messiah only you could stop_. The guilt is familiar by now, the pressing longing to see the world end a comfort in her ribcage that she fights with every fire she sets.)

The sunlight is soft, and for once Gertrude thinks she could trick herself into feeling safe, but thrum of paranoia that she tries so hard to control is always singing in her veins.

The pile of books with eyes neatly scratched out rests beside her, and she reads some of them when she decides to take a break. It isn’t lonely, because she doesn’t let it be, but she does wish that Agnes is there, if only to learn her taste in books. 

She decides not to think of it too much. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter. And Gertrude only deals in the grand scheme of things.

*

When Getrude gets hired for the position of Head Archivist she folds her hands in her lap and smiles a thin-lipped smile. At the time her hair is braided and brown, her eyes clear and sharp. There is a stubborn set to her mouth even then, and looking at her Jonah knows he has made a good choice. (Jonah had underestimated the determination, the cleansing fire that burns under her skin.)

(It’s not sadism. She’d like to make it quite clear that everything she did was out of love for every living thing.)

Getrude doesn’t get fired, per se, but she does get forcibly removed from the position. It is not fire that kills her, or the crawling rot. It is not the eye that has gazed upon her every waking moment, or the silken thread to her heart that wraps around her throat and her heart.

It is three bullets, shot with a steady hand and a calm smile. Violence is so dreadfully human, sometimes.

*

“I think if I knew you I would love you,” Agnes tells her, red-painted lips curling into a smile that is like shards of glass. She twirls a strand of auburn hair around her slender fingers, and the movement reminds Gertrude of weaving, of Arachne.

Normally that would make her sick. Now she just wants, suddenly, desperately, to kiss her hand, to touch every place the fire should have consumed her whole. (It would burn, she knows this, but she can’t find it in herself to care.)

“I think I already do,” Gertrude says, the softest thing she’s said in such a long time it feels like something is being ripped away from her.

They don’t touch. They don’t smile.

*

Gertrude loves her cat, and then there isn’t any cat to love but there is a man with a burning touch who cups her face and whispers; _the_ _whole world is just kindling _.__ She hates him for that, and she hates him for Whiskers and for the girls at school who sit with her every lunch.

She once read that angels carry a flaming sword, and she thinks that’s a different kind of flame. She thinks she wants to be that kind of fire, the kind that protects and nurtures everything under its warm touch.

Years later, she steps right up and raises her flaming sword, like she’s some kind of holy protector. Saint of the damned and broken, but then again, Getrude had never been the religious type, not since she was a child.

( _The road to hell is paved with good intentions_ , she thinks and breathes out smoke, lowering the cigarette with a snort. Her laughter isn’t musical or pleasant, but it’s the first time she has laughed in a long time.)

Sometimes people ask about the scar on her cheek, or why she does what she does. Gertrude never can find a proper answer for that, so instead she smiles a cold smile and goes about her business.

There is no point in talking about the man with the burning touch, or the dreams of heroism she used to think up as a child.

__*  
_ _

Adelard Dekker dies. She tries not to think of his charm and easy smiles.

She fails, of course.

*

Gertrude is all-seeing and all-knowing, and when you get to that point there is only the big picture, people stop being people. She doesn’t need individuals though, she needs the greater good.

There is nothing for her to hold on to, but then she sees a mother and a daughter in the supermarket and a pair of teenagers giggling over a book in the library. That’s what makes it worth it, she thinks. (Then comes the Dark’s ritual, and all she can think is _Oh_.)

Eric tells her that there is a way out, but she doesn’t think that’s for her. And yet some nights she raises a sharpened spoon to her eyes, before her hand spasms and drops it without her permission. It is probably for the best.

Gertrude has so much she wants to do with her life. Save the world, save her remaining assistants, get married someday. Be happy for once. But she knows that those are impossible dreams, so instead she just ties salt-and-pepper hair back and gets ready to kill monsters.

It’s a noble mission. If she didn’t know of all the people who had burnt in the name of divinity, she would call it holy. 

*

It’s an odd thing, to have your soul tied to someone else. Gertrude thinks she likes it, but that might just be because it’s Agnes. Some days it feels like she is weighing her down, the phantom presence of a girl who will never truly live. Sometimes all she feels is bitterness at the weight of her around her neck, the phantom press of hands on her ribcage. 

Looking at her now, Getrude wonders how she ever thought of Agnes as anything less than brilliant, anything less than running. She is reminded somewhat abruptly of a bonfire, of a candle on the edge of going out, of the flaming sword of her childhood.

“I feel like I know you,” she tells the woman with fire-bright eyes and unblemished skin.

“You might,” she says back, and reaches for her hand. Gertrude hates herself for snatching it back, but she had felt the heat already. She had felt how much she longed for it.

(Gertrude is cold, has always been cold since childhood, which is funny because she’s always been drawn to fire like some kind of terrible, twisted moth. Her favourite joke in the whole world; the girl who shouldn’t exist, who wants to burn everything down.)

*

What she does to Gerard Keay is inexcusable. Her hands do not shake though, even as she cries for the times they sang along to his loud songs and ate crappy chips together. He was a tool, nothing more. He deserved better than her, but she will make him useful in his death just like she had made him useful in his last moments.

He had deserved a life.

But then again, so did Micheal Shelley and Sarah Carpenter, so she just writes their names on her list of mistakes and goes to the funeral. She doesn’t cry, of course, but if you look closely she seems almost regretful.

A wasted resource she tries to make useful again and fails because of whatever kindness she had left and that was so much worse. But he had been charming and kind and it wasn’t fair. But then again, Gertrude had never worked in the realm of fair.

(She cries. That is only fair. She does not deserve to.)

Some days she feels like she can still feel the ghosts of them, the phantom touch of Gerry fixing her bun for her, tattooed fingers adding a braid to her bun. (her mother used to tell her that she shouldn’t get tattoos because one day she’ll be old and wrinkled, but Gertrude had doubted even then that Gerard would have to worry about that). Or the edge of a smile, the small kind once Micheal Shelley used to give her on quiet nights, not the tightly professional one with one too many teeth he wears now.

When she looks up at the night sky she thinks of the constellations in Sarah’s eyes, and lets the hot, dry sensation of a cigarette curl into her chest. They died by a flaming sword, in order to let the world continue.

They died for the greater good, all but one, and she formed them from rotten clay for that purpose.

(A list of excuses, never written down;

1\. They would have died horribly anyway.  
2\. She had to do it.  
3\. They weren’t really people, just pawns in a far larger game.  
4\. She is very, very cold some days.  
5\. It was for the greater good.)

*

The Eye knows everything, and it hates her down to her bones with what limited sentience it has. She’s heard of entities that bring you in with the siren song of you are loved completely, but that has never been for her. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t give her fully to the promise of power, of knowing just how to-

There is still power though, in the simple human things like explosives and sacrifice. (There has always been an urge to make things go _BOOM_. For as long as she has known herself, Gertrude had wanted to break things down so they could be known better. She’d started with herself.)

Gertrude was a curious child, and she hones that curiosity into deadliness until she was the perfect vessel for knowledge, empty and cold and so, so dangerous, She is the greatest weapon in a war that will go on long after her death. She is the deadliest song you’ll ever hear, she is the unblinking gaze that haunts men’s dreams.

*

An incomplete list of Getrude’s greatest mistakes folded inside her desk until the end of the world comes;

1\. Eric Delano, Emma Harvey, Fiona Law, Jan Kilbride. (She puts them all in one category in her head, because they only became people after their deaths and she hates herself for that.)  
2\. Agnes Montague, her death and her mystery. (Gertrude didn’t know her, didn’t know her favourite food or book or song. She loved her though, every smile and laugh she never got to hear.)  
Elias Bouchard. (Gertrude didn’t particularly like the man, didn’t find him interesting, but he’d had brown eyes and a toothy smile. It was his hand that had killed her, but not his bright eyes. Getrude wished she had smashed his head in before that, broken his bones and left him to a painful death. (He was afraid of her, no matter which eyes were in his head. Getrude thinks that is a victory, one among many. In the end, he won.)  
3\. Micheal Shelley. (The stupid trust he had put in her, the thing that took his voice and his eyes and his laughter. There is a scar on her wrist from when he shook her hand after, and those yellow doors haunted her for the rest of her life. Every victim he takes is blood on her hands, and she knows that will never change. She doesn’t let herself feel regretful.)  
4\. Gerard Keay. (That night in the hospital when she should have done something, anything. He loved her, and in some strange way she loved him back. THey’d danced to old music once, a simple human touch she hadn’t felt in such a long time. It didn’t change what she’d done to him, the choice she’d decided to make. She bound him to a book because she hated wasting resources and then she couldn’t look him in his eyes.)  
5\. Sarah Carpenter. (Getrude couldn’t tell even herself why she singles her out (she could if she was less of a coward; it’s because she died by fire and that makes it personal). Maybe it is because she is the embodiment of every pawn she had used and discarded as if she is nothing but a cog in some greater, treasured machine. Maybe because she was the last assistant not killed by her own hand. Maybe it was because she had been so earnestly curious, so eager to help.)

(G-d, she’s a pathetic old woman.)

*

 _Dear Gertrude Robinson_ ,

The letter won’t burn, which might be the greatest cruelty of it.

“Why do you hate the entities so much?” The man who does not have Elias’ eyes asks her one day, when her hair is grey and her proud features are wrinkled.

“The entities…” Gertrude takes a drag of the cigarette in her hands, leaning over the railing and tilting her head up. The smoke she breathes out is a weak facsimile of what she knows fire could become.

She considers lying, or saying _because I know what they are_ , of saying _the only person I will ever love let herself burn for her pathetic excuse for a god_ , _because of the people who worshipped it_. She almost says, _Because they are every rotten thing in the world_ , but that wouldn’t be enough for him.

He worships them, after all. Gertrude never even let her become the Archives.

“The Desolation killed my cat,” she finishes instead, letting the rush of dizziness she always gets from her first cigarette carry her through Elias’ laughter as if it’s a joke. He wouldn’t know what the comfort of an animal felt like to a girl who was so used to her family being destroyed.

He wouldn’t know what it felt like to lose everything. The only thing he knew of death was fear, and Gertrude had long since stopped bothering with fear.

 _My favourite movie is_ \- the answer is covered by what be a splatter of ink, or maybe blood. Gertrude thinks it is most likely a burn mark though.

*

A list of kindnesses, written out one day when Gertrude debated letting the next ritual reach it’s awful completion, updated through the years. Only a few points remain, the rest having long since been burned away. ;

1\. The little girl who had smiled at her and asked to help her find a book that Gertrude had loved as a kid. She gives her a recommendation before sending her off to her mother, and that carries her through a ritual. (After all, Gertrude takes what she can get.)  
2\. Agnes, who had burned so brightly and died so swiftly, who had loved her in whatever twisted way they could. (Her letter is tucked up in the pocket of her favourite black coat, worn and stained from tears and use. _I know you, Gertrude Robinson_ , it reads, and it is a far kinder knowing than what the eye offers.)  
3\. The young woman who had patched her up when she had stumbled into a convenience store, hurt and showing it. She sat her down in the back room, only a few years younger than Gertrude and far too skilled with bandaging and disinfecting burns. It’s just simple human kindness, she’d said when Gertrude asked her why, tongue stuck out as she secured the bandage, _I do this, you patch up someone else one day_. Gertrude does not say that she could never find it in herself to care about something so small.   
4\. Her cat with the soft fur and yellow eyes who sat on her lap and purred when she tried to work. She is nothing like Whiskers, but she offers something to cuddle when Gertrude can’t sleep, and soft fur to cry into. Animals are innocent. It’s a great cruelty to kill something small and fragile, with fur thick enough for a child to bury her fingers into it. 

*

Gertrude is not the Archivist, or at the very least it is not something that describes her anymore than ‘employee of the Magnus Institute’. She doesn't feel the fear necessary for that, remaining cool and controlled until she breathes her final, hateful breath.

Sometimes her eyes glow though, the red of fire and swords. Maybe that’s just like the red hairs she sometimes finds mixed among the brown and grey, or the spiderwebs she picks off and burns.

Gertrude Robinson refuses to give herself to the Eye, and she will step over as many bodies as she has to if that’s what it takes to keep the world happy and whole. There is a part of her that takes a sick joy in suffering now, and in her more indulgent moments she wonders if that has always been within her, or if it is a gift from her patron.

It is useful, in a way. Helps with making the right choices, if some part of her enjoys them.

*

Gertrude hopes she dies alone and cold where nothing can see her and there is no fire to cast light upon her.

She has never been afraid of the End. Perhaps some part of her thought that she could never die, and it is true that she lasted for far longer than anyone had before her. Her hair was grey when she died, and it was not old age or creeping fears that took her but rather a simple gun.

It was the end of an era.

Everyone can die though, even the formidable Ms. Robinson, who even the avatars feared. The only fitting thing about her demise is that she died in the tunnels, where even the Eye can not find her, The only fitting thing about her death is just how much it changed things. The only fitting thing about her death is that she died alone and hated. 

(A list of methods used to get what she wanted, never fully thought up;

1\. Manipulation. (Gerry had thought of her as better than Mary, and she had tried so hard to live up to that standard, but in the end she thinks she might have failed. Micheal had thought of her as a mother, but then she pushed him down into the jaws of something that spat him out so much worse, or never spat him out at all.)  
2\. Fire. (It was not the only gift she had been given by Agnes, and it had been one she possessed long before her but afterwards every match she lit it felt a feather-light touch, felt like love.)  
3\. Stubbornness. (Brute force, charisma and a certain bullheadedness got you a long way when you smiled politely enough. They really let pretty young women and smiling, round-faced old ladies get away with _anything_.)

Gertrude died human in all the ways except those that truly matter.

*

A list of things she is not, thrown out a day ago by the current Archivist;

1\. Kind. (Avenging angels are so very rarely kind, and whatever mercy in her had long since been burned out of her.)  
2\. A mother. (She pretends once, and she knows that sometimes when gerardmicheal look at her they think her hair is a different colour, or not there at all. Too cold, too broken somewhere inside that makes her crave Agnes’ burning touch. The joy she takes in it is perverse, because to her it’s almost funny, the suffering she inflicts in service of a greater good that she does not let them know of. She manipulates and she lies and she drags them and binds them like the puppeteer that she hates so viscerally.)  
3\. Loved. (No commentary can be made, as it is such a simple fact that she never gave much thought to it.)  
4\. Regretful. (Or so she tells herself until she is so old and withered that there is no point pretending anymore.)  
5\. Frail. (She is, however, an extraordinarily good actor. It is very easy to pretend she fits what people expect of her.)

A list of things Agnes Montague is not, burnt to ashes on the date of her anchor’s death;

1\. A prayer. (Gertrude is not the religious type, and the only holiness she can find in Agnes is in how much she loves her, as a woman and only a woman. Yet still it is not enough, a love founded on nothing; Gertrude does not know her, could never know her.)  
2\. A symbol. (Whenever Gertrude finds herself falling into that trap she reaches instead into the banked anger that runs along the red string that ties her together. She cries as she listens to the tapes she has about her; second hand testaments to her divinity.)  
3\. A human. (Neither is Gertrude, really, so maybe that is why her touch does not destroy her completely. Still, it is a tragedy of sorts, and she will never truly be anything but a burning idol whose touch burns and destroys no matter how much she tries not to. No need for human connection if one is not truly mortal. (And yet still she dies, fragile in the way holy things never should be.)  
4\. Alive. (Before, she died, or perhaps even after, she set a house aflame, and Gertrude will always remember the way the fire had danced in her eyes.)

*

Two women sit in a coffee shop. They leave, they set a house on fire together, they die tragic deaths.

It is the only time they meet, and as she leaves Agnes hugs her, a touch that does not burn as much as it should. It sears through the material of her cardigan and reopens the scar upon her cheek, and Gertrude treasures it no matter how much she wishes she didn’t. (It is in a way, a blessing.)

“What’s your favourite movie?” Gertrude says instead of goodbye, instead of _this mistake of a connection is the only thing that keeps me alive some days_.

Agnes doesn’t answer, just disappears with a burning smell that she dreams of sometimes, still.

Gertrude really did love her, in whatever way she could. Perhaps that is the worst part of it all, the fact that they loved each in spite of all that they were.

They don’t smile when they meet. It’s probably for the best, all things considered.

*

A simple choice; Those she loved weighed against the whole of humanity.

She picks humanity, There is no other choice she could have made that would have not meant a greater cruelty.

(Perhaps this is smoothing the edges off a woman who had killed so many. Perhaps she deserved worse. Perhaps this is a last kindness to a woman who had served as the final line of defence against horrors far bigger than even she could ever know. Perhaps that too, is wrong.)

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading, and come talk to me at @lesbianbirds on tumblr!
> 
> if you squint you can see where i gave up on characterisation and just wrote about gay yearning! now, can you tell i'm a lesbian yet?


End file.
